Life, Design & Dev

Life

What I’m comparing it to

My wife often uses an old 2006 MacBook Pro for web surfing, Google Docs, YouTube and a few other tasks that are generally considered lightweight by today’s standards. The MA610LL model came with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo (dual core for those who’ve forgotten that processor), 667MHz system bus and even one of those spinny things that dies and has to be replaced. A DVD player, yeah, one of those.

To be fair, I did upgrade it to 4GB of RAM and put in a pretty snappy HDD – 7200RPM and can do well over 100MB/s r/w. Well, snappy by 2009 standards when I put it in there.

The screen is old, yellowed and looks like some of the backlight might be out. The CPU often runs at about 75%.

A Chromebook, that can run all Google’s stuff, right?

It would only make sense that a Google Chromebook could play 720p video off of YouTube. I mean, if this over eight year old Mac can do it, shouldn’t a current model Chromebook? Continue reading →

Sometimes I find myself in discussions where I’ve brought up a half-baked idea that I’m not confident about. So today, on an email list of 2000 people I posted something. Normally I’d want to have it more thought out, but it seemed a good fit for a discussion. So I tossed the idea out there and it started getting picked apart. A discussion ensued and I enjoyed the constructive criticism that was given. As part of the discussion, this link was sent to me and I found it extremely valuable.

Over the years I’ve heard many reasons on what motivates us. This one does a great job of explaining why some of those reasons don’t always work. Better still, it gets to the core of the issue rather than creating superfluous reasoning.

For several years I was flying on average about once per month. Sometimes that included United Airlines. Always with my luggage I am very careful packing. Even still, more than any other airline, United broke things more often than not. One of the best examples was a brand new hard sided suitcase that was on its second ever segment. One corner was totally crunched and the case was deformed quite badly.

It seems like I’m not alone in my experience that United Airline is a champion at breaking stuff.

The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes has shown two segments detailing the root cause of the current mortgage crisis and stock market decline. Below is the most recent segment (Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction) which provides an overview of how it started, what went wrong, how they’re related and just how big the issue is.